The field of network security has become increasingly important in today's society. In particular, the ability to effectively protect computers, systems, and the data residing on such computers and systems presents a significant obstacle for component manufacturers, system designers, and network operators. This obstacle is made even more difficult due to continuously evolving security threats. Virtualization is a software technology that allows a complete operating system to run on an isolated virtual environment (typically referred to as a virtual machine), where a platform's physical characteristics and behaviors are reproduced. Virtualization can also provide for execution of a single application within a virtual machine. A virtual machine can represent an isolated, virtual environment (lying on top of a host operating system (OS) or running on bare hardware), equipped with virtual hardware (processor, memory, disks, network interfaces, etc.). Commonly, the virtual machine is managed by a virtualization product. A virtual machine monitor (VMM) is typically the virtualization software layer that manages hardware requests from a guest OS (e.g., simulating answers from real hardware). A hypervisor is typically computer software/hardware platform virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently. Applications represent a unique challenge in virtual environments because they can easily be manipulated in order to infect a given computer system. Security professionals and network administrators should account for these issues in order to protect computers and systems from emerging security threats.